NETA co-founder Arnon Vered sells Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, right, the first legal recreational sale of marijuana, an edible marijuana candy bar, at the NETA facility on Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2018, in Northampton, Mass. (Carol Lollis/The Daily Hampshire Gazette via AP)
A Massachusetts mayor became one of the first people in the state to buy legal marijuana Tuesday, purchasing a weed-infused chocolate bar.
Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz said he didn’t plan on consuming the marijuana product but instead wanted to memorialize it to commemorate the moment.
“I am actually going to probably preserve it and display it…because it is historically significant,” he told CBS News as New England Treatment Access made its first sale.
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By becoming the first to purchase recreational marijuana, Narkewicz hopes to end the stigma around the drug.
“There's obviously been a lot of stigma around marijuana in this country,” Narkewicz told NBC Boston. “Massachusetts has moved forward on it, in terms of first voting on it to decriminalize, then voting to legalize medical and now recreational.”
The first pot shops opened at 8 a.m. Tuesday in Northampton and Leicester. Both stores were already operating as medical marijuana dispensaries and were the first to be cleared by the state to sell recreational pot to adults 21 and older.
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Stephen Mandile, a disabled Iraq War veteran and a medical marijuana advocate, was chosen to be the first to buy recreational pot at Cultivate in Leicester, according to the Boston Globe.
Massachusetts was the seventh state to open recreational marijuana shops, but the first state to open them east of the Mississippi River.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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